


The Machine Code Man

by S_E_DeVault



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-04
Updated: 2019-04-04
Packaged: 2020-01-04 19:59:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 11,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18350669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/S_E_DeVault/pseuds/S_E_DeVault
Summary: WHEN NIKKO LOST HIS arm in Israel, the government replaced it free of charge, gave him a composite prosthetic wrapped in some real nastily stuff called PseudoQtaneous. When Nikko left his arm in a studio apartment just north of UCLA, he had to pay out of pocket.





	1. Chapter 1

1.

“Why is it that only the young think they’re immortal, when the old—having lived much longer—have comparably more inductive proof?” - Dr. Enrico Hoffman

WHEN NIKKO LOST HIS arm in Israel, the government replaced it free of charge, gave him a composite prosthetic wrapped in some real nastily stuff called PseudoQtaneous. When Nikko left his arm in a studio apartment just north of UCLA, he had to pay out of pocket.

What was nasty about PseudoQtaneous was how sticky it got when even slightly moist. On humid days, Nikko took to carrying a small container of talcum, which he would rub liberally over his prosthetic, afraid he’d be forced by circumstance to shake hands with a lefty and have to bear hearing that sick peeling noise—exactly like a naked thigh being drawn off a hot leather car seat—and seeing that cringing look of revulsion on said lefty’s face as palms parted, true flesh clinging to its sorry imitator.

They could almost be funny: those reactions, the looks on people’s faces as a regular, quotidian ritual was transformed by the grotesque and unanticipated; the reptilian fear of disease and contamination giving way to pity and embarrassment once their forebrains got a hold on the situation. A few times, Nikko wondered if it wasn’t just his lack of an arm that made them pity him, but his reliance on an obsolete technology, which is its own kind of disfigurement in this age.

It made him think that, think about getting a new arm, but he always put it off. He had some money; he could have wrestled enough together to get something new fitted, something that wasn’t coated in off-patent flesh substitute. But there were always more essential uses for his cash. And the arm worked well enough when it came to lifting and grasping, carrying and manipulating. Just no good for handshakes. So he put it off. And after awhile he started thinking he’d keep the thing forever—then he met Catalina Fitz at a bar in West Hollywood.

THAT NIGHT HE ACTUALLY got himself a little splatted, unusual for him. He didn’t like the feeling of his id taking the drivers seat, at least he didn’t like it in hindsight. In a booth in a bar called Frank’s, Nikko was trading rounds with Anthony Boole, an Australian with blue eyes and gilt features, an actor and fellow vet who’d just landed a big motion capture deal. He kept going on and on about how the movie business had lost its biggest perk. He said, “It’s no good for getting birds anymore. Only reason, the only reason I pull at all is there’s still some vestigial reverence in the female psyche for the movie star. Even though these days all we do is pull the strings of bloody software puppets.”

Nikko, getting tired of all the complaining, was just about to suggest Anthony give up on flesh-and-blood girls and get his kicks in VR like a normal person, when he saw Miss Fitz a few tables down, smoking one of those cigarettes which aren’t really cigarettes, just plastic cylinders filled with a glycerin/tobacco mixture that resembles smoke when vaporized: With nicotine dependence cured, it was pure fashion statement. Nikko found that interesting, almost as interesting as her weighty lips, the tongue behind which was nudging and twirling the electric cigarette as she inhaled, tracing out a torus with its simulated LED ash. Nikko said, pointing, “You see the black-haired woman there, green eyes, has the lips of a succubus? You think she’s got any vestigial reverence for movie stars? Those days are dead, and the fucking nostalgia’s dead too. You’re deluded, Ant. If you’re in it for the girls, I figure you’d be better off working out how to be charming.”

Ant’s handsome liniments twisted into a real offended look; then he started saying he knew all there was to know about charm. And Nikko just asked him, just asked, “If that’s true then why’re you complaining about how little you’re pulling?” And Anthony’s had no response to that, just sort of got stunned for second—till he jumped out of the booth they were sharing and made his way towards Fitz and the girl she was chatting with.

Wasn’t five minutes and Anthony was walking back with a girl on each arm, a big smirk nailed under his nose. Nikko smiled at that and then at Catalina, who, it seemed to him, was just playing along for her friend’s benefit, a redhead with very fake tits and a décolletage to match. Type of girl, Nikko figured, Ant was wont to go for, leaving him with Lips, as he had her labeled ‘till she sat down beside him and told him her name. Said, “Good meeting you; I’m Catalina Fitz.” Nikko told her his name and said he wasn’t entirely sure if he was pleased to meet her. She laughed a little more than she should have; a good sign, he figured.

“And what are you?” Nikko asked, looking into chlorophyll eyes.

“I’m the girl talking to you.”

“Nah,” he said. “What are you? Student, lawyer, programmer, one of the unemployed millions ruing automation—you know, what are you?” She said she wasn’t going to say, that what a person does isn’t who they are. Nikko raised an eyebrow; she laughed and told him she was studying mathematics at UCLA and then asked him the same question. He smiled, said, “Stop being so shallow; what a person does isn’t who they are.”

She giggled then, her turn to raise an eyebrow. “No seriously, what do you do?”

He told her the truth, that he was working half-time as drill instructor at the Marine Corps Recruits Center, that he had since the war. “Mostly, the job is yelling at young nerds , the smart technicians that program the drones. The brass, they still want their new recruits to experience the whole shoe-shining-and-obstacle-course thing for a few months, as its traditional. But it’s all running on inertia now, vestigial” Sometimes, he told her, he felt like an anachronism.

And she said, “Aren't we all?”

An hour later, Anthony left, taking Red with him to some industry party in the Heights. Nikko and Catalina just kept drinking, talking, laughing, flirting so hard they both knew sex was inevitable, each hardly even noticing their friend’s departure. By the time they staggered out of the bar, both were criminally intoxicated. So they hailed an autocab, which took them to Fitz’s apartment, the two of them grinding against each other like teenagers as the insomiatic city flowed past, the view through the windows as neglected as an airport television, their drunken affair continuing in the elevator, taken to an uncoordinated conclusion atop the extruded-nylon sheets of Catalina’s single bed.

EARLY SATURDAY MORNING, THE sun just above the horizon, Nikko woke up with a headache and his arm, his prosthetic arm, wrapped around a sleeping Ms. Fitz, who was using it as a sort of ersatz pillow, her face clinging to the false skin, now sticky from drool. The night before, he had done his drunken best to hide the thing–wasn’t hard that, what with him keeping his T-shirt on and both of them in no state to notice much of anything. Not tough at all. But now the girl was sleeping on it, stuck like a bug to flypaper. And the last thing Nikko needed was to interact with her. It would have been embarrassing enough without her pealing her cheek off his arm, wondering what the fuck was going on.

So Nikko was lying there wondering if he should just wake her, get it all over with, when this real beautiful image from a National Geographic webpage he read as a kid started kicking around his occipital lobe: that of a gecko detaching its tail to escape an eagle’s talons. Nikko smiled. And for or the first time since he watched, live, as the holy land was transmuted into radioactive glass, gaping at the muted television which hung from the badly-plastered roof above the bed in the Egyptian hospital room in which he was convalescing, Nikko was glad he lost his arm.

Still smiling, he reached over his torso, his right hand sliding up his left shoulder. He felt around for awhile, careful to keep things silent. He found the threaded steel ring which attached his prosthetic to the titanium nub anchored to his humerus, carefully unscrewing it. Last step, he deactivated a spring-loaded fastener, then, free of his arm, rolled out of bed.

He left her apartment and took a cab home, leaving Catalina with her ersatz pillow. On the table by her door Nikko didn’t leave a note or any sort of contact information, just a small container of talcum powder, now unneeded.


	2. 2

“Friends are those people that meet the same diagnostic criteria.” - Dr. Enrico Hoffman

“I STARTED OUT PLAYING Hamlet at seniors homes, which isn't nearly as bad as it sounds. Performing for geriatrics is a bit like resistance training—you know, running around with weights in your shoes—because you've really got to earn your standing ovations. I mean, sometimes there’s equipment involved,” is what Anthony Boole said to Allison Argo, the redhead he did not spend the night with, who had, however, agreed to meet him for a 10:00 Saturday breakfast at Angel’s Waffles and Chicken, but only after implying he was a little eager setting up a first date for the morning following their first meeting—telling him that, generally, what a guy’s supposed to do is take his time, play hard to get. “Make it 10:05 then,” is what Ant said to that. Which made her smile.

“So you used to work in a medium even more antiquated than film,” was her response to the Hamlet joke, a sly smile transmuting insult into flirtation. Waiting for a reply, she took a bite of her Alabama waffle, which is this crazy southern dish consisting of a waffle covered with fried chicken, whipped cream, maple syrup and gravy.

“Well, yeah. And when I was fourteen I was a line cook for a summer. Eighteen, I was a soldier in the Short War. I’m no stranger to antiquated professions.”

Angel’s is this 5th street restaurant that’s been around awhile. It was founded just before the end of last century—thirty-five years old the morning Ant and Allison walked in the door. The decor has never changed much, was retro the day it opened, a style which has compounded every year since into a sort of antediluvian trademark. The customers liking the superficial southern hominess about the place, attracted to the strange synthesis of what never was and what hasn’t been for a while: booths with checkered tablecloths, smiling waitresses with name tags above their left breasts actually delivering food by hand. Save for the automated kitchen in the back, it could be used as the set of some cheesy period drama, which could be why Anthony frequented it, as he had always wanted to star in a period piece, get into the mind of someone pre-millennium.

“Line cook? Like, you touched other people’s food with your hands? Fucking savage…”

“Sometimes I used my toes.” He said, making Allison roll her eyes. “I washed them first… Anyways, you chose manual cookery over war as evidence of savagery? Strange bird.”

“War’s exciting. A sweaty kid sneezing all over the food he’s preparing?” She made a gagging gesture, sticking her tongue out, leaning forward in her chair. She made these nasty heaving sound effects, too, and dragged the gag out so long people at the other tables started noticing—some amused, others straining their eyes, trying to make out what she was eating and if it resembled anything they’d been chewing on. Ant telling her to stop, but not quite able to get it out as he kept laughing, looking just as crazed as his date. When Allison finally did give up on the gagging routine, she started laughing, too, and then they were both doing it, each at the other, then the people staring at them, finally just at the situation itself.

Eventually their waitress —a short chubby woman, had tired grey eyes— walked up to their table and told them to calm down and keep silent, “Or I’ll kick you out before you've finished your food.” The two of them still laughing now but sincerely trying to muffle what they could. “And you’ll still have to pay you ever want to eat here again.”

Anthony said, back in control, “You know, sometimes you start bloody laughing at your own laughter and that’s when you’re in trouble. But it’s over now. I laugh again, I’ll give you a three-hundred dollar tip.”

“You serious?”

Ant thought for a second, said, “Sure, I’m serious.”

“This blind guy,” the waitress started saying, “goes to the hospital for surgery, wakes up with an implant makes it so he’s no longer a blind guy—“

“This a joke?”

“You laugh, I’ll make three hundred.” Ant shrugging his shoulders now, saying fine go ahead with just that slight adjustment of his posture. “It takes him three days to heal up. On the first day, the doctor activates the implant. The blind guy starts crying, tears wiggling out of his new artificial eyes, says, ‘I’ve been blind since I was twenty-three-years old and now I see. Thank you, thank you for giving an old man the gift of sight.’ On the second day he was discharged, went home to his wife’s care and told her, ‘Everything is so beautiful! Even what I thought ugly before I lost my sight I now know to be full of the most profound and gorgeous intricacy.’ On the last night of the third day, he was lying in bed with his wife and she says to him, ‘it’s been three days since you made love to me; I’m filled with three day’s desire. I know the doctor told you to rest, but I really cannot wait; make love to me, make love to me now.’ The formally-blind guy turns his head and looks his wife up and down, says, ‘Sure thing, honey, just let me hit the lights first.’”

“That it?” Ant said. She told him it was, then asked him if it was funny, if it was worth three hundred dollars. Ant told he was sorry but it wasn't even worth thirty-five cents; she shook her head and walked away, mumbling something obscene which got Allison laughing again. Ant resisted.

Noticing, Allison said, “You’re not serious about the bet?”

“I make a bet I bloody honor it”

After hearing that, she couldn't stop herself. Making him laugh and lose some money became the goal of the date now—Allison trying to bust him up, Ant doing a pretty good job of keeping himself together. It got to the point where Allison was making farting noises with her lips, blowing big squealing raspberry’s in Ant’s direction. Ant responded to this pseudoflatulence like it was the most enlightened conversation he’d ever heard, saying things like, “You’re right, Rembrandt’s dark pallet may well have been influenced by clinical depression,” and, this was after a real loud, squishy one, “Yes, the modern experience with automation has disproved certain classical economic assumptions, but you’re entirely wrong to think this implies Marx was correct.”

They kept that up for awhile, Ant starting to get confident now, pretty sure he could make it through the date without laughing—then he saw a gleam in Allison’s eyes, the very literal gleam of her contact lenses.

“Someone calling you?”

“Cat, you remember Cat from last night?” Ant nodded. “She’s sent me a text message, a picture too.” Zoned out now, like she was looking at something far off in the distance. “Shut up for a sec, got to read this.” About thirty seconds in, she started giggling—said, “You’re wearing tacts right?” Ant told her he was wearing augmented reality lenses, that he had gotten them free from work so he’d never forget a line. But—and here his words oozed with insinuation—he had disabled his before the date, for courtesy’s sake. “Turn them back on then,” she said, oblivious “I’m going to send a picture, and then you’re going to lose three-hundred dollars.

ALLISON WAS SMILING AS she stepped out of her cab and made her way to her apartment. She still had some residual giddiness form the date, having had a pretty good time with Ant. He wasn’t like most guys. Most guys didn’t take girls out for breakfast, at least not in consensus reality. What most guys did was invite her to hang with them in VR. And there was nothing wrong with that, really. Allison spent the majority of her life with her eyes closed and a magnetic stimulation collar wrapped around her neck, her mind off working, studying or exploring some fancy entertainment while her body lay paralyzed in bed. But there was something to the whole old-fashioned meal-and-conversation thing. It gave them time get to know each other, to talk without any flashy distractions.

And there were adventures in regular interactions that were just as exciting as any entertainment. Like that bit with the waitress; that had been something. Her telling Ant that awful joke. Getting all disappointed–straight up swearing when he didn’t laugh. And then at the end of the meal when Allison forwarded him that message Cat had sent her–that ridiculous picture and that invective-filed paragraph describing how Cat had woken up with this disgusting prosthetic arm stuck to her face and had to peal it off like some used Band-Aid. Anthony lost it completely after reading that. And the waitress, she walked over like some Brooklyn shylock, telling him, “That’s three hundred you owe me.” And he paid up too, a little upset but trying to hide it, doing a pretty good job. She liked that, thought he looked pretty cute when he was pretending he didn’t care.

Her apartment was an extruded carbon-composite flat, part of a large complex of mass-produced flats, all of the same vivid white.

Extruded flats are extremely popular as the rent is so cheap and they’re perfectly livable. Every apartment a self-contained pod, each part of a complex that consists of three-to-five hundred stacked together like those old Lego toys. They are assembled without human intervention, so there’s always vacancy. If a new tenant needs a place, all the landlord has to do was call up a supplier and a shiny, fully-furnished apartment will be delivered and installed by robotic crane. Everything–electricity, plumbing, fiber—is installed and maintained without human intervention, hence the cheap rent.

Her place was in the middle of the medium-sized stack, about three stories up. So she had to climb a few flights of stairs to get to it, stairs which were supported by a bulky scaffolding which surrounded the complex, a dull aluminum cage. Figuring she needed the workout, Allison didn’t mind the climbing. She didn’t mind much of anything about modular housing. What it did it, it did well, is what she figured. She knew a few people who lived in old, pre-modular apartments. She always wanted to ask them, ask them, What’s the point of having a nice apartment when your spend most of your life in VR? Getting a fancy place seemed like the type of thing you think your doing for yourself but is really about impressing other people. But then, who was she to judge? She had cosmetic augmentations, two boluses of force-grown psuedotissue injected above her pectorals and some heavy stem-cell augmentations in her cheekbones and lips.

But that wasn’t the same, right? She had gotten them for herself. She had decided as a little girl how she wanted to look. She remembered the moment—eight-years old watching this ancient spy movie with her grandpa. Siting primly on a plaid sofa, her thin legs dangling a good three inches above the floor, her eyes focused on grandpa’s television—an ancient plasma contraption bolted to a papered wall. On screen was this unbelievable woman, waist-deep in azure, walking towards the frame. Her grandpa saying, “They sure don’t make ‘em like that anymore,” and Allison deciding, right there and then, that she was going to look like that when she grew up. And if her genes wouldn’t do the job properly, well, she’d have to explore other options.

And she did, the day she turned eighteen.

At the time she he was a freshmen at Khan U, taking technical writing classes in VR for no fee. Working in VR too, living cheap and saving maybe a third of what she pulled in. She worked scripting gigs mostly, improvising real-time dialogue for rich folks who wanted realistic interactions, who weren’t satisfied with the inflexible chatbots that powered commercially-available entertainments. She was good at the work, at becoming a character, composing witty real-time responses and then handing them off to the server which ran the show. She both loved and hated it: sometimes she felt like novelist, a novelist exploring virgin territory. Other times more like a mascot at Disneyland, improvising personalized interactions in a plastic world she had no chance of meaningfully affecting.

Regardless, the work was important, important because it gave her a taste for creation, important, too, because with what she made she was able to acquire beauty. And that had changed her life, becoming beautiful. She remembered walking out of the doctor’s office, surprised there was no need for anesthetic, just a large fee and a couple-dozen injections. The doctor saying, “It’s an outpatient procedure now. Give it a decade for the price to drop, then boob jobs and face work will be as commonplace as pierced ears.” Examining herself in the mirror a few weeks later, highly satisfied with the result but slightly guilty, thinking, maybe I should have pursued bigger dreams instead of bigger tits. That was one of those domino thoughts that spur self-recrimination, made her think that maybe spending six-month’s savings on cosmetic augmentations wasn’t the best way of achieving her dreams—nested in that the more salient questions: what were her dreams?

She asked herself that question sincerely for the first time; an answer came. Within a week she had transferred out of the arts and into computer science, writing code for the first time since high school, glad she was forced to learn what she had thought, then, she would never use. Appreciating for the first time the depth and exactness of programing languages, so unlike English, so free of ambiguity—not beautiful but prescriptive, exact, functional. Rules uniform and applied without exception. And now two years in, her classes were still fascinating–almost illicit, in a strange way. When she explored an entertainment, she felt like some narrow-eyed bodhisattva, feeling intuitively what others knew only abstractly. Knowing on a gut-level that what lay beneath the splendor and sensation–the optics and the haptics—were but stark symbols, manipulated trillions of times per second.

It was all a vast illusion, yet it is no less for being so. Perhaps the same is true for real life, she thought. How would I know? Arriving at her door now, a small camera in the frame recognizing her face and gait—releasing the bolt just as she touched the knob.

Her apartment looked the same as every modular flat she had ever seen: a bathroom, an automated kitchen, a table, a bed and that’s all—everything part of the structure, built into the apartment. The furniture was an ergonomic vasculature emerging seamlessly from the walls. So for all its artificiality, it looked organic, like the insides of some static organism—everything built of printed composite–stark white with an eggshell texture, unpainted and unpaintable, as no known pigment can bond with printed composite.

After a quick meal of toast and egg-substitute, Allison grabbed the stim collar which lay by the pillow on her bed, wrapped it around her neck, and laid herself down, supine. Closing her eyes, she began her programing homework.

Programing is one of the few tasks which hasn’t changed much in years. Sure, there’s no screen or keyboard. Sure, all input is subvocal. Sure, most modern programmers don’t so much use a text editor as become one with a text editor. But it all comes down to the same thing in the end—arranging symbols in such a way as to get a CPU to do what you want it to do. So even though Allison felt as if she were floating, weightless, in microgravity, even though her “screen” encompassed her entire field of view—phosphor-white syntax in geosynchronous orbit with her awareness—VR did not so much make her work easier as grant her the iron focus of sensory deprivation; hours passing as minutes do, time measured by the small victories and frustrations of implementation rather than the ticking of an ancient mechanism or the vibrations of a shred of quartz.

She didn’t stop coding until she realized, the feeling abstract, subtly alien, that she really needed to piss. Staggering out of bed and into the bathroom, her muscles stiff from torpor, relaxing only after she got on the bowl. Midstream, the piezoelectric implant in her tympanum started buzzing and a picture of Catalina Fitz appeared in her field of view. Allison blinked twice, accepting the call.

“Can you believe that asshole, a fucking arm in my bed. Really? Hey, are you laughing? This isn’t funny; No you’re right; it’s a bit funny. I’m still fucking livid. Who does that type of thing?”

“I was talking with Ant about it this morning—“

“Who’s Ant?”

“Anthony, he’s that actor we met last night. He invited us to the party at that producers house. I accepted; you and Captain Armless declined. Remember?

“Yeah I remember him now. I was really drunk. How was the party?

“No good; I was hoping to meet someone who produces entertainments; but everyone there was a film buff. You know the type. Going on an on about how they don’t let their kids use VR, how they’re forcing them to watch movies and television so they grow up all cultured and snooty. Fucking infuriating. I left early, took a cab home, but not before Anthony asked me out agian.” She told Cat about her breakfast with Ant, the bet, everything. Then she said, off the throne and washing her hands now, “So while we were waiting for our cabs, I asked Ant if he had any idea why that Nikko guy pulled the arm trick. You know what he said?”

“What?”

“He said, ‘Probably, he was just embarrassed, wanted to get out as soon as possible. He hasn’t slept with a girl outside of VR since he lost the arm.’ So it’s not like he was doing it just to be an asshole, to hurt your feeling or whatever. He just saw the arm thing as an easy way out. Anyway, a few time in their lives, I bet most guys would detach their arm when—“

“When they wake up next to me?”

“Sweetheart, you know you’re not ugly. So don’t pretend you think you are just to get my sympathy. What I’m saying is he got drunk and woke up next to a girl he just met. If it had been a virtual… dalliance all he would have to do is deactivate his stim collar, and he wouldn’t have to deal with morning-after stuff. This is a guy whose had nothing but VR sex since the war, it makes sense he didn’t know how to handle the aftermath in real life, that he was looking for—and found—an easy way of avoiding sober interaction.”

“Now you’re making me pity the asshole. The least—and I mean the very least—he owes me is an apology, in person”

“You really care that much.” Catalina said she really did. “Fine.” Allison said, “ Next time Ant calls, I’ll try and convince him to convince this Nikko guy to apologize. What I’ll do is tell Ant I won’t see him again until this Nikko calls you up and says he’s sorry.”

“And you think that’ll work?”

Allison smiled, thought about how well the breakfast with Anthony went, and said “If he likes me as much as I like him, it will work.


	3. Chapter 3

“Yes, VR is a distraction for idiots, but it’s not just a distraction for idiots.” - Dr. Enrico Hoffman

ABLE, JUAN DELGADILLO'S RIGHT hand, was standing in the hallway. Yumiko thought he looked pretty drab. He was white, around forty, basically conventional, and was wearing this real bland suit, a suit like those Tokyo salary men always wore on the old TV soaps her mother used to watch back in Japan. His coat was of a near-black grey, his pants of a near-grey black—both well-fitted but nothing special. He looked widely out of place in San Francisco, though less so through the peephole Yumiko was eyeing him with, the fisheye glass warbling and twisting his formal aspect so he looked vaguely psychedelic and therefore vaguely San Francisco.

Yumiko watched him for a stretch, thinking about what would happen if she didn’t bother answering his knocks, his rings, if she made of him a specimen, an impulse study in frustrated expectations. She imagined staring through the peephole as one would a microscope, playing the indifferent scientist, determining (and carefully recording) how long it would take for his cheeks to redden in frustration, for his eyes to dull, to gather a gloss of anger, thoughts of lost opportunities and coquettish assassins in mind

What would happen is he would leave. What would happen is she’d lose a lot of money, piss off Delgadillo and more-than-likely wind up dead in a compost heap, end up fertilizing some yuppies organic garden. What would really happen is it wouldn’t happen at all. But there was still this perverse attraction to the idea of stasis. It was the same feeling she had when she went cliff diving in VR, standing on the edge, working up the courage to jump even while knowing it wasn’t real—two conflicting aspects of self—idiot animal fear and rationality—meeting (two lines in a graph) for just a single discrete instant, one overcoming the other. But for a moment Yumiko let the scenario play out. For a moment, and just for a moment, she continued watching, standing by the door—no not standing by it but leaning against it, hunching against its hard oak siding, her right eye level with the peephole, her left closed tight. Looking pretty damn San Francisco in her hip-hugging miniskirt, leg warmers and too-short tank top, her slick animatronic tail jutting out of that hyperbolic divot where spine meets tailbone, shaking back and forth lazily in tune to the beating of her heart.

And for that moment, she let the guy stew, but then her head started aching. It was an ach that killed idle thoughts, that made her want to get the deal over with. Just take the money, do what needs doing, and then what? Well, she’d probably hole up in bed for a few hours, relax in some undemanding entertainment. That’s what she always did when the headaches hit: retreat to VR. And after that, after that she’d catch a cab to the airport, maybe spend some time in Montreal or Berlin or Xiamen, someplace out of the way where she could relax for awhile. Yes, that’s what she’d do when the job was finished, once she got the money for this her final kill; she was looking forward to it. But for now she unlocked and opened the door, said, “Come in, but don’t talk business ‘till you hear the lock click behind you.” Her tail swaying a little faster now, she turned and walked toward her sofa—a white leather monstrosity with faux-fur cushions leaning against each arm rest. “And take off your shoes. That carpet cost me three grand. ”

Able just nodded, and walked in a few feet, closing the door behind him. It clicked. Kneeling over his laces he said, “You’re not what I expected.” He was frowning a little now.

Yumiko said, sitting down on a fur cushion, “I know, right? Not many woman in this business. I joined up just to even out the demographics, purely on feminist grounds. Well, that and the money.” “No wait,” she said, and here she lengthened her words, “it was exclusively for the money.”

Able laughed a shallow laugh. “No, the boss told me you were a woman. What I didn’t know was you were otaku.”

Now “otaku” is a strange word with variegated meanings and a complex etymology. But the short of it is, it’s a loanword from Japan and has three core meanings, each tied to a particular era. Back before the world was swallowed by software and simulation, an otoka was just a geek with a particular jones for manga and anime. When VR went mainstream, an otoku was someone who spent most or all of his or her free time in anime-themed constructs. These days, the word’s changed again. Now it is used to refer to very rich girls who get implants, eye work, skin lightening, and animatronic augmentations, all with the goals of acquiring in real life the proportions and countenances of their anime avatars. People becoming their avatars, this is a new and strange phenomenon, but not unexpected, as the virtual mimics the real, the real the virtual.

Yumiko said, “And you’ve got a problem with otaku?”

“Not a problem, just a visceral abhorrence.” This he said with all the trappings of politeness, with a smile and direct eye contact, his voice thin, unassuming. Yumiko, affronted, told him she thought of herself as being pretty good-looking, asked him if he’d care to elaborate on the whole abhorrence thing. Able, finished with his shoes now, walked towards the couch Yumiko was sprawled on. He took a seat on the black-leather chair opposite it, resting his feet on the glass coffee table which served as an interstice, a sort of DMZ between customer and purveyor. The heals of his calf-high business-man socks slid against the crystal glass, leaving a thin glaze of sweat and oil, a putrid trail, on the otherwise immaculate tabletop. He said, “You make dolls of yourselves, caricatures of woman. You are beautiful, but beautiful perversions. Don’t be offended, though” He widened his smile, revealing expertly whitened teeth, “these are only the grumblings of an old man unsuited for this new age in which the stick has become the lips, the rouge the cheeks, the dye the hair, the hobby,” he drew his eyes to Yummiko’s tail, now curled around her waist, “the personality.”

“Whatever, you don’t have to like me.” Yumiko said, unsettled. She was often unsettled in her line of work.“ All you have to do is hand over the crypto and not waste my time negotiating..”

“As my employer told you in his correspondence,” the same smile, those same teeth, “your price is acceptable.” He took notepad out of his breast pocket, wrote down a long string of alphanumerics, and threw it on to the coffee table, maybe six inches from where his feet were resting. “I have a picture of her—“

“Jesus Christ. I don’t want to see a fucking picture. Just give me the address and the biometrics for confirmation.”

“Time was,” Able said, the biggest smile yet creeping up his jawline. “you had to look a woman in the eyes before you took her breath away.” He took the picture out of his pocket and threw it down on the coffee table, just as he did with the notepad. “Everything’s written on the back. Make sure you burn it when you’re finished.”

Then he stood up, walked to the door, put on his shoes and walked out. Didn’t say a word. Or maybe he did. Yumiko was too busy verifying the cryptocoin to notice.


	4. Chapter 4

4.

“I can think of nothing more detrimental to our enlightenment goals than a comfortable dark age.” - Dr. Enrico Hoffman

THE MEDAL WAS THE war’s farewell, presented by a polished bureaucrat with a smile and handshake, his palms too smooth. Nikko sat on his couch, twirling it between the fingers of his new prosthetic. 

The arm had cost him $7 000—a lot by Nikko’s standards, about two months salary, maybe a third of what he had saved up. But he was already pretty fond of the thing. It was a purely functional, made of smooth, polished aluminum with slick ceramic joints and thin silicon sensors at the tip of every finger. It even came equipped with a magstim interface of bioequivalent resolution, perhaps the best feature by Nikko’s reckoning. Rubbing the medal between his new thumb and index now, able to feel minute details: the wrinkles of an eagle’s feathers and Lady Liberty’s sharp countenance.

As for the medal, he usually kept it in plastic bag under the sink, right next to a plunger and a mason jar full of bacon grease. He’d pull it out whenever he felt nostalgic. Getting his third arm had reminded him of how he lost his first one. And so he took out the honor, feeling a little foolish holding the thing—thinking he should probably feel like a hero instead of a fool. Maybe, he thought, a hero is just a kind of noble idiot. But he stopped himself there, as that seemed like one of those philosophical thoughts that are not even worth thinking. Noble, stupid or both, his actions did not add up to much. And in the end, the only life Nikko saved was his own.

He did get a good pension out of the deal: an extra ten grand per annum. It would certainly be welcome when he retired, only eight years to go, as military men can retire at age forty. Live out all the rest their years on Sam’s dime. 

Well, he thought as he reached for his stim collar, I’ve still got a few more years left. Which was true, but he was only working half time, had been since the Share Government Jobs Act got the president’s signature. Working Wednesday, Thursday and every second Friday, he was practically retired now, suffering form an excess off free time. Though not so excessive on reflection, as VR is ravenous beast—and time its only meal.

He wrapped his stimcollar around his neck, aligning the magstim transmitter with his spine. And when the stimcollar was in place, he laid back down on the couch, his muscles embracing a perfect toper as he did. His ‘tacts became opaque. His eyes tar-black now from pupil to sclera, blinking occasionally.

“YOU OWE ME THREE-HUNDRED dollars and an apology,” is what Anthony Boole said the moment Nikko joined him in his construct, lining up his cue for a shot at the seven—adding, “Corner pocket.”

The program was a model of a 19th century billiards hall, peopled with about three dozen simulated dandies, each decked out in the full deal: lace sleeves and linen suits with kerchiefs delicately folded in their left-breast pockets and golden watch-chains hanging down to their pantaloons. Some of these fops (around ten) were playing snooker at the other tables but most were sitting near the bar where this pretty virtual barmaid was serving virtual beer. Nikko and Anthony’s avatars were identical to their real bodies in every way, save for Nikko’s lack of a lack of an arm. They were dressed in their normal fair, too, which looked decidedly anachronistic. Of course, none of the dandies could notice, all of them but vacuous automatons imperfectly controlled by CPU.

Nikko said, “I’m sorry?” And Ant made the shot, which wasn’t particularly difficult.

“Don’t be. The apology, it’s not for me. The three hundred, that’s for me” And here Anthony started grinning. “The apology’s for the girl who woke up with a disembodied arm stuck to her face.”

Nikko grimaced, asked Ant how he knew about the arm incident. Ant—lining up his next the shot (ball number three, center pocket), it working out perfectly, not even grazing the felt—said to Nikko, “You remember Allison, the girl I met Friday night?”

“Red head, big tits, shallow?”

Ant said that that wasn’t a fair description. “The hair and tits maybe, but shallow? How would you know? You didn’t even talk to her?”

Nikko said, “I could tell she was shallow just by looking at her.” This got a smirk out of Anthony.

“Regardless of what you think, Alison’s a very smart girl. She’s a programmer, you know.”

“Who isn’t these days?” 

“You for one, you bloody moron. Anyways, we really clicked, really had a connection. I took her out for breakfast yesterday.” He told Nikko about how they almost got kicked out, and the deal he had made with his waitress. “End of the meal, she gets a message from her best friend, Catalina Fitz—a picture of your arm—”

“My former arm”

“Right, a picture of your former arm on her bed and a short description of the situation. I know because she forwarded it to me. I ended up in hysterics and out three hundred dollars.”

“And it’s my fault you made a stupid bet?”

“It wasn’t a stupid bet.”

Nikko disagreed, said it was a stupid bet because Anthony didn’t stand to win anything. Even if he did make it through the meal without laughing, he still wouldn’t have won any money. “It’s like a game of roulette where breaking even is the best-case scenario, where all that happens when the ball lands red is the croupier doesn’t’ take your chips away.”

Anthony thought about this for a while, leaning against his pool cue, finally saying, “Okay, so it was a stupid bet but it was not an incredibly stupid bet.” Then he explained. “I’m a dramatic actor, half the job is not laughing at the absurd shit the writers churn out. That’s why nobody respects comedic actors.” He walked past Nikko and around the table, to the top-left corner where the cue ball had ended up. “Their job’s easier because sitcom scripts are never funny. My point is, the bet may have been stupid for a civilian, but I’m a trained actor. I had a very good chance of making it.”

“Ant, you know I’m not going to give you three hundred dollars.”

“What about the apology?”

“Fine. I’m real sorry you lost three hundred dollars.”

“You listen to a thing I just said? I don’t want you to apologize to me; I want you to apologize to Catalina Fitz.” Nikko looked at Ant and did the eyebrow thing he always did when he thought someone was messing with him, then asked Ant why the hell he would want him apologizing to Catalina Fitz. That was when Anthony explained what had happened—just the night before—when he called up Alison looking to set up a second date.


	5. Chapter 5

“The universe is infinite, right? So even if I die I’m bound to happen again eventually.” - Dr. Enrico Hoffman

THIS ONE MORNING, IT was around the first blush of spring, Yurmiko said to this guy she’d been sleeping with for maybe a week, “I’m going to tell you something. A secret.”

He said, “Yeah.” They were lying in his bed, each on their side, facing one another and sustaining eye contact in that gentle way lovers do.

“I’m not really a bored heiress. I work for a living.” He asked her what she did then. “I kill people,” she said, smiling that sly smile that first caught the guy’s attention a week before, when his tire had gone flat halfway down The Panhandle—the bike lying on the side of the trail, him trying to figure out if he should just ride on the flat or waste the rest of the afternoon walking home, when Yumiko pulled over on her composite twelve speed and grabbed a repair kit from under her seat, saying he looked like a guy who could use the help of a well-prepared woman. They biked together for awhile after that, then he took her out to lunch as a thank you and things when on from there.

“You kill people?” he said, the right corner of his lip lilting upwards.

“Professionally,” is what she threw back.

He laughed and said, “And who do you work for then, the Yukudza, the Cosa Nostra?

“Oh, whoever’s willing to pay,” she said, giving him a onceover now. “I’ve never been particularly particular.” He laughed, kissed her and that was that.

They fooled around for a few minutes and then he went off to pick up breakfast, walking out of the room with a smile on his face, thinking about how lucky he was to have found a girl with a sense of humor, adding in a joke of his own, “Make sure you wash the blood off your hands before you clock out today. Can’t have my woman reeking of death.” She giggled at that, a sharp little part of herself relishing the moment, enjoying rubbing the joker’s nose in some very deep shit he couldn’t even smell. There was a sense of power to the whole charade, but also a big helping of stupidity and the first slick curves of a very dangerous slope.

Yumiko had once promised herself she’d quit the day she started enjoying her work. As she needed the money or, at least, wanted the money, she crinkled her brow and dulled that sharp little part of herself, not so much by grinding it down to nothing as covering it with a nacre.  
Then, hearing the townhouse door close, Yumiko climbed across her lover’s bed and set about hacking his stim collar—a newer model she hadn’t yet figured out how to crack without direct physical access. And when the guy came back with the breakfast, Yumiko watched him cook, by hand, this very barouche omelette, acting like one of those cooking-channel guys do: explaining each ingredient to her before mixing them in with the eggs – every spice in it’s own little bowl. Yumiko found the whole show vaguely pathetic, that is until she had a bite.

Three weeks later the guy’s maid found him rotting, and Yumiko didn’t think about him much after that, but she was thinking of him now, at least that sharp little piece of herself was, scrambling up some eggs in the small kitchenette of her hotel room in Xiamen, wishing she’d asked for the recipe before she clocked out.

See, Yumiko was an unconventional cutthroat. She didn’t know jack about guns, poisons, piano wire or any of the classic tools. She spent most her time studying stim collar firmware.

Stim collars use fluctuating magnetic fields to manipulate the afferent nerves, paralyzing the wearer while providing simulated tactile sensation. This means once you get root accesses to someone’s stim collar, you get root access to their brain stem. And from there the job’s a cakewalk: she could fatality lower their heart rate, stop breathing entirely, and do other less-pleasant things. Yumiko always went for the heart-and-lungs routine. She wasn’t a sadist – at least no more than most people in her line of work. She killed for money, not for pleasure. All her targets died painless deaths. There was no need to make things complicated.

The hardest part of the job was cracking the firmware. This took a lot of time and a lot of smarts. But she had a gift for finding holes in code, had since she was a teenager hacking away at her smartphone, figuring out how to run unsigned programs. There was a mad race at the time, a competition among the grey-hat types to see who could crack the latest security patches on consumer smart phones. There was no money in it, then. And by today’s standards, the security was laughably weak. But it had been good training, and she and able student.

Now she read code like a veteran professor does an essay, searching for mistakes, subtle trips of grammar, for opportunities hidden in the syntax. Bugs, basically. And her efforts paid off. She had written a program which cracked every stim collar on the market – almost ninety percent of them without direct physical access.

She’d made a lot of money with it. So much, she was she was set to retire from killing and move on to something bigger. All she had do was finish this job she had been paid for before she left for Xiemen. Better get started then, she thought. She stood up, picked up the picture Able had tossed on the coffee table, scanned the back with a quick blink of her ‘tacts, laid down on the couch and activated her stim collar. 

She was at her office now. sitting at her desk, hunched over, typing on a wireless keyboard, Her equipment out of style but not—at least not in her opinion—obsolete. It was effective and she was fond of it, so fond that if even though she coded in VR, she set up her environment to look just the same as the workstation in her childhood bedroom—a simulated desk, a simulated monitor, a simulated keyboard actuated by simulated hands. White text on a black background, the feel of fingers depressing keys—these were comforting things. They created an atmosphere, an atmosphere essential to the focused state of mind she had been perfecting since her father first taught her C, at the age of nine, 20-odd years ago.

A few minutes of typing and she had the program running. All she needed to do now was type in the name, address, and biometrics of her target. And the next time said target jacked into VR would be her last. Yumiko made a gesture and the picture appeared on her desk. She looked at the pretty girl’s face, then flipped it over, read what was written, and began entering the information into her terminal, wondering briefly why Juan would pay her twenty million dollars to kill some nobody college student.

What could she possibly have done, this Catalina Fitz?, Yumiko briefly pondered – before moving on to the question of what she would do with all the money she’d acquired. And this wasn’t really much of a question. She was going to get out for good.

MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRLS ARE intelligent, too, Nikko thought, going over some of the pretty girls he could remember meeting in his head, and realizing the gods often do give their gifts in equal measure. Working on a maths masters, Catalina was certainly as smart as she was beautiful, and she was fucking beautiful, though in a sort of mousy way some guys might overlook. She was also scary, real scary, but had a sense of humor too. He could see the sparks of laughter in her angry eyes, and figured he could fan them into something a little less intimidating if things got too intense, the situation being as absurd as it was

Him in front of her apartment doorway, her just standing with one hand on the inside door knob, listening to him finish a half-hearted apology. Though it had turned a bit sincere around the two-minute mark, when he realized his whole gecko-tail plan had only made things a million times more awkward, and that, perhaps, spending all his free time in VR had made him forget how to act in the real world.

They say that’s what’s most dangerous about spending too much time in entertainments: you start thinking you’re a protagonist instead of a person, start acting like your in a story and that never turns out well in real life.

“So,” she said, “Alison’s new guy made you do this?”

“No, Alison made Andrew beg me to do it. And you made Alison make Andrew make me do it. So you made me do it, but now that I’ve done it, I’m thinking I was wrong anyway.

“That’s quite a mouthful.”

“Yeah, well, what you’ve got to know is I didn’t walk out because I never wanted to see you again, ,though I was planning on never seeing you again. I walked out cause I didn’t want to see the look of disgust on your face when you realized you’d slept with a cripple.”

“You think I’m that shallow.”

“I think that’s not the type of thing you want to surprise someone with.” Catalina nodded. “You probably wouldn’t have reacted well. Plus it was stuck to your face.”

“Yheah,” Catalina said, all the anger in her eyes replaced with a sort of twisted curiosity. “ What was with that?”

“I don’t know. The flesh substitute gets sticky when wet and you were drooling all over the thing. Nasty stuff. I’ve been meaning to get a new one for years.” Nikko tapped his new arm, which was just fitted the day before. ‘Just needed—“

“An excuse.”

“Yheah, it was a two-birds-one-stone situation, appealing to my hung-over brain. Look, Cat, I’m not exactly wracked with guilt here, but it wasn’t my most impressive moment. So I really am sorry. And I do think you’re pretty cool.”

“Well,” Cat said, the anger now gone from, “See, that there was a pretty good apology.”

“But not good enough,” She said. Then she opened the door wider and slapped Nikko in the face with his old prosthetic, which she’d been keeping hidden behind her back.

He stood their, stunned. Then he started laughing.

And as she dropped the arm and slammed the door, Nikko could hear Catalina laughing too.

It was the last time she did that.

Alison found her dead the next morning.


	6. Chapter 6

“My home is gone, my family dead, all I loved there destroyed. You will forgive me my bitterness on the topic, I hope.” - Dr. Enrico Hoffman

HE HAD SOMETHING OF a knack for the work, even when he first started the job. It had amplified in the years since, down to an art form now.

A performance? Certainly, but what isn’t? The suit, the soft features, the pressed tie, his antiquated getup so appropriate, as what is more old-fashioned then death? Only life, he thought, this making him smile an internal smile, his face remaining placid, inoffensive as he said, “Ms. Argo?”

The pitch of his whisper rising slightly as he said the words.

“Yes,” she said in the irritated tone of someone woken too quickly. Though she hadn’t been sleeping but thinking, her gaze stuck on the wooden pew in front of her, though she was ignoring her sight, immersed in thoughts and speculations on her friend’s death, nearly as divorced from reality as someone in VR.

“I didn’t notice you back here or I would have alerted you. The procession has left.”

“Oh,” Alison, “I just needed to sit for awhile. I lost track…”

“Entirely understandable, Ms. Argo,” He offered her his hand. “Come, we have cars left, though I’ll have to call one from the garage. If you get in now you’ll be able to make it.”

Alison took his hand and stood up. “No she said,” smiling sadly. “I don’t need to join them. I’ll just take a cab home.”

“There’s no need to call for a cab.” He said smoothly. “If you would prefer not to join the procession, just say the word and our car will drive you home.” Alison bowed her head and followed his lead, which took her between the pews and towards the exit. She looked back at the wooden paneling, the wooden floors, the wooden cross and thought, dead trees.

A Lexus was waiting for her on the street outside the mortuary. Alison didn’t see the guy do it, but he must have whispered an order – or maybe he had sublingual sensors implanted – would make sense for a man in his line of work, with the need for silent communication. However he did it, the car was ready and waiting and Alison was getting lead towards it.

He was holding the door open for her and she was just about to get in when she asked. “Who’s paying for this?”

“The funeral?” he said in his soothing tone. ‘Mr. and Mrs. Fitz paid for this service.”

“No,” Alison said, “The cars.”

He told her that they were included in the service, that people didn’t like using autocabs for processions, because of the advertisements. She got into the cab, said her address aloud and went on her way.

She started to cry in the front seat of that car, barely able to shout her address at the console. Tragedy making a child of her, then. But she got herself together by the time the car pulled up in front of her her apartment. First thing she did after after getting through the door was wrap her stim collar around her neck, and dialled into a construct run by her friend Jason Odec.

He was a kid she had met in a functional programming class in Kahun U. He looked like an adult, had a mind far sharper than most adults, too, but she could tell he was a kid, even though the voice and body he wore was that of a forty-something. Unlike a lot of people, his avatar was not freakishly good-looking, just the body of a scrawny man, and that hoarse voice, too. Most people assumed it was just a scan of his true form – but Alison knew better, knew there was no way he was born before the widespread adoption of VR, which made him no older than fifteen.

Kid’s raised in VR, well, they’ve got a different psychology that those who weren’t. You spend your childhood routinely violating the laws of physics, then graduate to an adolescence that usually involves losing your virginity to countless NPCs, if that even counts, while exploring the tawdry often sickening displays of id that gild the edges of the constructs – well you turn out a little odd relative to those born before.

Those that make it tend to become obsessed with one narrow thing. Having spent their childhood in a world without restrictions, they realize at some point the rules, even arbitrary rules, are important for sanity. Most settle on some restrictions they like by adolescence – and stick to them with fervor.

Many get religion, this explaining the rise of The Church of the Absent God. Many more became otaku or fantasists – devoutly visiting only certain genres of constructs and obeying within them their recondite laws. Jason, Jason became a programmer like Alison, only more so.

Since they met, the two had been studying together at least once a week. Taking the course mostly for the accreditation, Jason spent their study sessions tutoring Alison or, when she wasn’t in need of his help, working with abstruse data structures only vaguely relevant to what they were working on in class. She figured he’d get drafted into academia in a few years – or start making millions programming bots for predictions markets. But for now, he was just a student like her. And in his strange way one of her closest friends.

“I swore off entertainments entirety a few years back, now I focus exclusively on programming. I read novels when I need entertainment” he said to her once after he got to know her better.

“Really?” She asked, finding the notion mildly shocking.

“The final straw? I had pirated this cheap NPC girlfriend, you know, one of those silly bots that follow you round, whisper sweet nothings in your ears. Make you look like a bigshot in historical entertainments. I kept her for a few months. Then,” he told her “I was walking through a public construct and I see a guy walking past with an NPC that looked just like her, I mean voxel to voxel identical. And, you know what, I got jealous, would have punched him if the server allowed PVP. Over a fucking 3D model wrapped around an expert system. The human mind wasn’t made for this shit, and the entertainments are even worse than the NPCs.

“Why?” she had said. She was particularly fond of entertainments.

“With the NPCs you get fake love, with the entertainments you get a real of sense accomplishment for non-achievements…”

That was one of the more frightening sentences she’d ever heard. It made her think of all the people she had met in the fantasy constructs. Heroes of no consequence, preferring grand quests and magic to the dull realities in which there bodies were immersed. Many of them were on the dole, some working scripting gigs on the side like she was or selling digital goods to rich people who couldn’t be bothered to acquire them themselves. But even if they worked outside of the Entertainments, they only truly lived within them. 

Those words hadn’t made her give up on Entertainments, or her desire to create them. But they had made her realize their power – they also got her to respect him as more than just a programming prodigy.

“Let me guess,” he said when she appeared in his construct – a giant replica of one of Oxford’s libraries he had built for them to study inn. Completely quit and void of NPCs -“you need my help with the sorting algorithm? I’ll give you a hint. Really it’s not that hard to implement -”

“This isn’t about the fucking algorithm.” He gave her a shocked look after that. She apologized, sat down on the wooden table beside him, and told him about Catalina.

The Police had an autopsy done,” she said, finishing the tale, “found a lesion in her brain stem, right in the part that controls breathing. She was in VR when that little piece stopped working entirely. You know stim collars take control of your breathing when you’re in VR, right?” 

“Jesus Christ, “Jason said, catching on.

“As soon as she took off her collar there was nothing telling her lungs when to breath.”

The two sat in silence after that, Jason not entirely sure what to say. Their friendship being more about instruction and parallel studying than heartfelt conversation. “I’m sorry,” He finally managed to mumble. There was silence again for a few more minutes. He finally said, “Is there anything I can do?” 

She had been waiting for him to say that.


	7. Chapter 7

“To man, everything’s a mirror.” - Dr. Enrico Hoffman.

NIKKO MADE A HABIT of keeping his ‘tacts recording at all times - partly in case he misplaced something important, a little bit out of legal paranoia, too - he was wrong in this, as one can’t live without committing a capital offence, so recording yourself probably increases your chances of unjust incarceration, if anything. Or maybe he did it because it was cheap and easy and came free with the decommissioned audio ‘plants he bought after the war, these pulled out of some dead shmucks skull, sterilized and offered up for sale.

Everything he saw and heard for the last fifteen years was stored in high-resolution on the near-microscopic carbon memory card implanted just beside his cochlea, it constantly hoarding his present experience for a future self who was as likely as not to be uninterested - as the brain is pretty good at remembering what actually matters to the personality it’s implementing, regardless (or maybe because) of how it fudges the details. It did prove useful today, though. Earlier that morning, he had spent two hours looking over some of its video, playing back the script he and Ms. Fitz were spiting out in the hours before her lungs gave out - Nikko having heard about her death through Anthony, whose shoulder Alison was leaning on in the days after she found her friend.

Nikko was sad for Catalina and Alison both, but wasn’t about to get tearry-eyed. Having his best friends reduced to charred shadows had taught him how to cope with death. The death of a girl he just met, even a charming one, wasn’t going to take him down too far, but it was a bit of a mystery - a young women dying like that. Police said it was just a lesion but Ant said Alison wasn’t so sure, said she found a pattern of similar deaths and was obsessing over it like some kind of conspiracy theorist. Nikko figured she’d just sublimated her grief into paranoia, but he almost hoped for the opposite, hopped his real life had grazed, at least for a moment, an event as dramatic as an entertainment, dramatic but with consequences beyond the accumulation of points or in-game social status.

These thoughts bittered the the torrid, 30s-era romance entertainment he was wallowing in now - his simulated body only half-aroused as a leggy NPC beckoned him in for a kiss - then this dull pleasure was interrupted by a flash of his ‘tacts informing him someone was messaging him - a link to a chat construct setup by Alison. He accepted and his paralysis broke with a jolt, his tacts clearing quickly, the real world now a muddled blur, now almost as clear as the false one, now clearer still - lacking the mottled sepia tone of the entertainment.

He stood up and greeted Alsion, whose avatar was projected sitting on the chair right next to the couch he had been lying on, noticing as he did how much she resembled the NPC he’d just been interacting with.

“What can I do for you?” Nikko said, traces of the 30s era aristocrat he’d been playing moments before leaking into his voice.

“I got my hands on the security footage from Catalina’s stack; you were the last person to see her alive.”

Nikko nodded, said, “The last person to see her in real life, anyway.” Then he stuck his hands out a couple feet in front of his eyes, manipulating a UI only he could see and navigated to his ‘tacts memory dump and forwarded her all the video he had examined that morning. “Here’s everything my ‘tacts picked up - you won’t find anything supporting your conspiracy though.”

“Anthony told you?” Nikko nodded. Alison frowned but didn’t say anything more. She paused the conversation entirely, her body becoming a static mannequin as she watched the video, this taking all of fifteen minutes, during which time Niko got up and made himself a cup of coffee. He was just poring some cream into his cup when Alison’s avatar broke free from its eerie stasis. 

“You don’t believe me,” she said. Nikko took a sip of his coffee.

“I think think the real world isn’t like an entertainment. Here, people die for no reason.”

ALISON NODDED AND EXITED the chat construct. The world blurred and blackened and she was taken to Purgatory - the default world that exists between constructs. An endless, grassy plain, void of animal life and weather. The Purgatory is an inoffensive environment and designed to be so, a bland transition to cleanse the mental palette. Alison said a word and a menu appeared before her eyes. She selected “Odec’s Library” from a list of most-visited constructs. Then she blinked and she was in that that vast, silent library, having appeared right next to the large wooden table she and Odec always studied together on, which itself was in the centre of a small clearing surrounded by a forest of bookshelves. Though were they really bookshelves if they didn’t carry real books? Alison had once taken one off the shelf out of curiosity. The thing wouldn’t even open. The leather cover bound a solid mass of an ivory-like substance. Jason hadn’t bothered to put in pages.

Alison spent the next hour re-watching Nikko’s footage. She didn’t learn much, and hearing her friends voice over and over again was bringing her to the verge of tears - but she was saved from another crying jag when Jason arrived, appearing on the table beside her without warning (as it was his construct, he didn’t have to send a notification). He looked the same as he always did, but she could tell from his voice that he was tired.

“So I’ve been going through the Sousveillance Society archives with some facial recognition software, and I’ve got a map with most of Catalinia’s whereabouts for the last six months.” The People’s Sousveillance Society is a organization whose members share their ‘tacts’ footage and publish it on the open web. If you walk down any street, about one in ten people will be running PSS software. First started as a response to police brutality, they now believe in radical transparency, dedicated to the death of all secrets. Especially their own. If the state can have a vast, overweening surveillance system, they figure, then the people should, too.

“And?”

“And it doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know before. I mean, like all of us she spent the vast majority of her time in her apartment, probably in VR. She occasionally dropped by UCLA for in-person meetings with her advisor, but only twice in the last six months. I mean, how common are in-person meetings these days?”

“Ok, so you were right,” Alison, said. “It was a long shot. Did you find any more similar deaths?”

Jason smiled. He was enjoying this game. Alison wondered, briefly, if to him this adventure was like just another entertainment. And his enthusiasm that of a junky taking his first hit after a very long withdrawal. “When you showed me the first few deaths, I’m not going to lie, I thought you’d gone a little off. But you were right, this, this wasn’t an accident. He waved his hands and a large screen materialized to his right. On it was a collage of about a half-dozen corpses lying on gurneys. “four more deaths,” he pointed at the bottom half of the screen, “making seven in total, years apart. All of them mathematicians or computer scientists. All of them died just after leaving VR. All of them with lesions in the exact same area of their brain stem.” He grinned again before catching himself and neutralizing his expression.“This is big.”

Alison was silent for a moment.

“So what should we do?” Jason said.

“Send what we’ve found to police. But make sure it’s anonymous.”

Jason nooded.

Alison said, “Do you know what a MoCap system is?”

“Yeah, motion capture, it’s what the geezers used before stim collars.”

“Now that I know I’m not paranoid, I’m going to buy an old MoCap system on eList as soon as I leave this construct. I want you to do the same. Text me once you’ve got it. Let’s stay the fuck away from stim collars for awhile.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Jason said. “What are you going to do in the meantime?”

“Find out what sort of research Cat was working on.”


End file.
